Tag Archives: Chicago Tribune

Declarations that ISIS is on the verge of defeat keep piling up. During his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump said he was proud to report that “the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria.” In Iraq, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told his country in December that “we can announce the end of the war against (Islamic State).”

Territorially, the Islamic State has been squashed. But the threat it poses remains all too real — and ominous.

The New York Times reports that thousands of Islamic State foreign fighters have been slipping out of the eastern Syrian battlefield and hiding in Damascus and other parts of northwest Syria. Many with European roots are paying smugglers to get them over the Syrian border into Turkey, which they hope to use as a conduit to return to their homelands in Western Europe. Some have training in chemical weapons and are staying in Syria to join al-Qaida’s branch there.

Routed from its prized strongholds of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, the Islamic State is now becoming what many militant groups morph into after their defeat on the battlefield — a guerrilla movement that emphasizes soft target attacks, using suicide bombings and ambushes to prey on places where civilians congregate.

Baghdad has been a prime target for those attacks. But few places in the world are immune. The wars in Syria and Iraq drew fighters from more than 120 countries. Thousands died in battle, but Western officials say it’s likely that thousands more escaped to their home countries. EU officials think as many as 1,500 militants have returned to their homes in Europe. There were also Americans fighting in Iraq and Syria, though how many were directly affiliated with the Islamic State isn’t known.

Will some postwar militants give up the cause? Perhaps. But it would be foolish to think that many others wouldn’t bide their time and wait for the right moment to inflict terror. Whether carried out by sleeper cells or lone wolves inspired by Islamic State propaganda, we’ve seen what that carnage looks like in London and Manchester, Paris and Nice and, in the U.S., Orlando and New York.

Turkey is a front line for preventing postwar militants from heading westward. Right now, however, Turkish forces are attacking Syrian Kurdish fighters that the U.S. wants at the Syrian-Turkish border as a firewall to Islamic State migration. The Trump administration so far has failed to get Ankara to stand down. Failure’s not an option, however. Islamic State militants slipping over the Syrian-Turkish border isn’t just a Turkish problem — it’s a threat to many Western nations.

For their part, European governments have improved cooperation between their intelligence and law enforcement agencies, following criticism in the wake of terror attacks in Paris and Brussels that such cooperation was lacking. Part of that cooperation involves European intelligence outfits feeding and checking new databases of suspected foreign fighters.

As more Islamic State militants leave Syria and Iraq and head westward, Europe along with the U.S. will need to intensify that cooperation. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good about regaining the territory ISIS had seized across Syria and Iraq. But it is far too early to believe the militant group has been defanged and defeated.

It tells us that many of the most privileged people on the planet, American college students, are barbarously illiterate when it comes to understanding the freedoms given them by the Constitution.

A barbarously illiterate people can easily be turned into an angry horde. It is dangerous work, yes, but it can be done. They can be herded, cynically, with prompts to emotion and calls to anger for short-term political gain.

But having thrown away any understanding of their freedoms, such people cannot remain free for long.

According to the survey, when asked if the First Amendment protected so-called hate speech, 44 percent of college students said no.

And 16 percent said they didn’t know the answer.

More than half, 51 percent, said they think that “shouting so the audience can’t hear,” also known as the heckler’s veto, is an acceptable tactic for silencing a controversial speaker.

So just shout them down. Scream. Don’t engage, don’t ignore, and don’t bother to use reason and offer counter arguments to win the battle of ideas.

Instead, shout with venom. Shout with feeling. Shout with power and shout with anger so that those doing the herding can goad you into the chutes. And when many shout together, even to silence ugly viewpoints, here’s what happens: Their faces become contorted, and spittle flies from the corners of their mouths. This is not what a free people in a republic looks like. This is what a mob looks like.

Perhaps most ominous of all, according to the survey, is that 19 percent of students believe that violence is an acceptable response to ideas they don’t like.

That is an astounding number; 1 in 5 college students believes it is OK to simply club your opponents down with a baseball bat.

I hope that number is wrong. I hope that once the survey by John Villasenor, of the University of California at Los Angeles, is offered up to peer review, something in the methodology will be found amiss. But I doubt it.

And yes, the survey received financial support from the conservative Charles Koch Foundation, which will allow the left to cry foul.

But we’ve all seen thuggery on college campuses in the news, and the silencing of dissent and the attention to safe spaces — so given all that, the survey results aren’t really that surprising.

We’ve seen those professors, even liberal professors, psychically or physically intimidated, even injured, by the antifa thugs of the left.

And we’ve seen, with but a few exceptions, the relative silence from Democratic political leaders and liberal pundits, who may not embrace the violence, but readily embrace the use of raw emotions for political advantage and internet clicks.

What’s the matter, guys? Crickets got your tongue?

To say that all this is chilling doesn’t quite do it justice. It is monstrous. And we can see that weed growing.

These college students aren’t the enemy. They are our sons and daughters, our nieces, nephews, friends, contemporaries.

But they are the future leaders of our nation, and from among them will come our politicians, judges, intelligence officers, prosecutors, administrators and information technology engineers overseeing how Americans receive their political news.

And sadly, it is clear that too many have a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution, particularly of the First Amendment that protects all American liberty.

Some speech is called hateful because it is indeed hateful, and racist and bigoted. Who likes or appreciates bigoted speech? No civilized person appreciates it. We loathe it.

But it is still zealously protected by the Constitution. Why?

Because if even hateful speech isn’t protected, we allow our freedoms to be killed off.

It is far too easy to apply the “hate speech” tag to other kinds of speech, called hateful only because it is politically unfashionable. Some of it is subversive, threatening those in power, and those in power already let loose their dogs to bark and shame and shout the subversives down. That’s politics. What’s not acceptable is thinking that government has the right to shut speech down.

In a nation founded on liberty it is understood that we can’t regulate political speech even if it’s hateful, because having the government regulate speech would end all speech. It would allow partisan politics to ooze in, like sepsis in a wound, and regulate out any ideas that the elites find threatening.

So we allow Black Lives Matter and other protesters to shout out their animus toward police, “Pigs in a blanket/Fry ’em like bacon,” and we allow Nazis and the KKK and those white boys with the tiki torches in Virginia to shout their alt-right hatred of minorities and others.

We protect their speech, hateful as it is, to protect our own.

That’s how we’ve kept ourselves free, by adhering to the First Amendment of America’s most sacred document, the Constitution.

How did so many college students not learn this before college? How did so many not learn this in their K-12 educations?

Such profound ignorance didn’t just spring fully formed from some political forehead. It has been reinforced. They’ve already been herded.

It has been taught to them by indifferent parents, by a corrosive entertainment/media culture, and perhaps most importantly by their high school teachers who have groomed them for this and future years.

“The rule of law is always compromised by power politics.”

Before Chicago’s mayor feuded with Attorney General Jeff Sessions over federal immigration policy, before sanctuary city politics and long before Donald Trump became president, a man they didn’t know was standing on a street corner in Chicago.

Dennis McCann, an insurance broker, was about to cross North Kedzie Boulevard and have dinner with a friend.

“He was going to meet a friend, a client, Jose Gonzalez, owner of El Cid, a restaurant there,” McCann’s brother Brian told me Tuesday. “They were close. My brother just wanted to cross the street and see his friend.”

It was June 8, 2011, and Rahm Emanuel had just been elected a few weeks before on the charms of his former boss, then-President Barack Obama. Jeff Sessions was a senator from Alabama. President Donald Trump was just a rich guy on reality TV.

Most likely there was nothing on McCann’s mind about illegal immigration and whether Americans have the right to control their own borders — issues that would later propel Trump to the presidency.

What was Dennis McCann thinking about? “He was probably thinking the same stuff you and I would think about when we cross the street and a friend is waiting,” said his brother, “like what to order, what to drink.”

So Dennis McCann began crossing the street.

And he was hit by a speeding car.

All that was left on the street were his sandals. And the rest of Dennis McCann was being dragged hundreds of feet down Kedzie.

“I heard the impact, saw this man go up into the sky and land on the windshield,” witness Alberto Aceves told the Tribune at the time, describing how Dennis McCann fell off the hood to roll under the speeding car. “I pull up to the passenger side screaming at him. ‘Stop! The guy’s under your car.'”

The driver finally stopped the car, got out and tried to run, but was arrested by police.

Saul Chavez, then 35, a Mexican immigrant here illegally, had been drinking heavily. The Cook County sheriff’s office said Chavez had a blood alcohol content of 0.29 percent, more than three times the legal limit. Chavez had just completed probation after a drunken driving conviction two years before.

Chavez was charged with a felony — aggravated DUI — and was given a $250,000 bond. Two days after McCann was killed, federal officials filed an immigration detainer, believing Chavez was living in the U.S. illegally. The form requested that Cook County notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement if Chavez was scheduled to be released.

But as Chavez sat in jail, Chicago Democrats on the Cook County Board were playing immigration politics. Led by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, and catering to the Latino vote, they worked out a new policy: The Cook County Board decided that federal detainer requests would be ignored, and those suspected of being in the country illegally and in jail on criminal charges could make bond without fear of deportation.

Chavez did make bond. Cook County did not notify immigration officials. And within days, what happened? Chavez fled. He disappeared back into Mexico, where he remains out of reach of the short arms of Chicago’s law.

“I’ve talked to the feds recently,” said Brian McCann. “They know where he is. Chavez is in Mexico. There is a Mexican warrant out for him. But it hasn’t been served.”

McCann was quiet for a moment.

“What justice did my brother get? Chicago Democrats got to pander to the Hispanic vote and ignore the rule of law. And the mayor now gets a campaign issue. And my brother? Nothing.”

I first wrote about this case years ago, and called Brian McCann on Tuesday to write about it again, to remind people that politics isn’t the only thing at stake here. Lives are at stake. And confidence in the rule of law is also at stake. Without confidence in the rule of law, a republic collapses into mob rule.

Sessions is threatening to withhold federal law enforcement grants if Emanuel continues with Chicago’s sanctuary city policy. Emanuel filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, demanding the federal funds.

“Chicago will not be blackmailed into changing our values, and we are and will remain a welcoming city,” Emanuel said.

Our Chicago values?

Hearing the mayor talk, you almost forget that he was stridently opposed to illegal immigration not long ago. And under Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama, he demanded repeated and high-profile federal immigration raids and deportations and crackdowns at workplaces across America.

But now he’s Mayor Zorro.

What’s amusing is that some are so blinded by their hatred of Trump, and so oblivious to how Chicago politics really work, that they’re actually applauding Emanuel for standing up to alleged Trump bullying.

Rahm must smirk at such useful idiocy. It all plays into his hands. He’s hurt himself with African-Americans, so he drops his sanctuary city card again and again, cozying up to Latinos as he seeks re-election.

“Under Clinton and Obama, Rahm was against all this,” said Brian McCann. “Now he’s a sanctuary cities proponent. The rule of law is always compromised by power politics. That’s all this is: power politics for Rahm and Preckwinkle. And public safety be damned.”

Big-city Democrats step over people like Dennis McCann, because the Dennis McCanns are in their way. Mentioning the Dennis McCanns runs counter to approved power-politics narratives, and they become the forgotten.

Is it possible — perhaps even likely — that terrified liberals and Democrats are right about President Donald Trump?

Yes. I want to be fair, here. It’s quite possible they are right.

Trump’s politics and policies frighten them, but also his personality, even his facial expressions.

And so the smell of burning Democratic hair wafts over America, and through much of the media, as the political theater of the left becomes not only increasingly noisy but also increasingly violent and hostile.

That odor carries the scent of judgment, a scent of warnings unheeded over years, as Democrat and Republican establishments encouraged the growth of imperial presidential power under presidents Bush and Obama.

What truly scares the left — and many establishment Republicans — is that President Trump is the most powerful man on Earth and he’s told them to go (jump off a cliff).

He holds the awesome power of the federal hammer in his hands.

And now, he’s exactly the kind of imperial president they never, ever wanted.

Yet there is a solution that may just rid the air of burning hair.

If Democrats are serious with all their caterwauling and shrieking about Trump, if they are truly worried about a chief executive running amok, there’s one thing they must do: Support Trump’s nomination of a conservative candidate for the Supreme Court in the mold of the late, great Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

If not, then all the Democratic hair-on-fire theatrics, all the handwringing about Trump and “alternative facts” when they were silent about Obama administration falsehoods — it all tells Americans a story. It tells Americans that Democrats aren’t remotely serious, and that all the left is really doing is screaming about lost power.

“For most of the 2016 campaign, the very idea of ‘President Trump’ seemed like a thought experiment a libertarian might have invented to get a liberal friend to focus on the dangers of concentrated power,” Gene Healy wrote in a piece for the libertarian journal Reason a few weeks ago. “Now it’s an experiment we’re going to run in real life, starting January 20, 2017.”

That experiment is underway and media reports refer to the “Scalia-ness” of the Trump nominees.

And so, if you’re truly worried about Trump’s overreach, you’ll demand an originalist on the Supreme Court.

What the nation needs now is someone who understands that the Constitution was written not to bow to the impulses of an imperial presidential personality, but to hold it in check and protect our liberty.

Yet for decades, the bipartisan establishment didn’t care. Some years, Democrats held the presidential hammer and other years, Republicans held it.

Republicans sometimes complained about Democrats referring to a “living document,” but they, too, used that idea of a malleable Constitution and an increasingly muscular executive.

“Living document” was a cheap line offered by establishment hacks to accommodate power. It was all an inside game, an establishment game, an understanding among elites that the presidency was their federal hammer, not the people’s.

It allowed liberal courts to legislate from the bench. It removed responsibility from an increasingly supine Congress that deferred to the presidency. And it put the people on the outside, where the establishment wanted them. That’s corrosive, and it erupted with Trump.

One who recognized this long-term danger to the republic was Barack Obama. Campaigning for the presidency in 2008, he rightly chastised President George W. Bush.

“I taught Constitutional Law for 10 years,” candidate Obama said in 2008 on CNN. “I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States of America.”

He took it seriously all right. Obama seriously grabbed even more power. When the Democrats had control of Congress, he pushed through his Obamacare health plan, now falling of its own weight.

That cost the Democrats control, and when he was at an impasse with a Republican-dominated Congress, he tossed his concerns about an imperial presidency out the White House window.

And he announced he’d bypass Congress. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” he said, and began writing his own laws, like a boss. Like a Boss mayor of America the Chicago Way.

Democrats weren’t merely silent as Obama took extra constitutional steps. They were overjoyed, because he was their guy.

So came Obama’s Libya policy, and U.S. missile strikes there without Congressional authorization; the targeting of journalists who irked him; the unleashing of the Internal Revenue Service on conservative organizations; and the secret surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency. NSA director James Clapper famously lied to Congress about it.

If you want a valuable examination of presidential overreach, I refer you to Ilya Shapiro in The Federalist. Shapiro characterized Obama’s imperial presidential overreach this way:

“It’s as if the goal was to show Donald Trump how it’s done.”

The way to stop this is to hold the Constitution close. And to have Supreme Court justices interpret the Constitution just as it was written, for this very reason: American liberty.

NORM ‘n’ AL Note: What Obama really showed Donald Trump and the entire American population was how NOT to do it. Obama showed us how to govern without an ounce of care for the citizens of the country. He showed us how to govern with no concern for anything but ego and agenda. Hillary showed us exactly the same thing. And these egomaniacs with terminal agendaitis made the fatal mistake of thinking Americans wouldn’t notice or care. If Donald Trump gives us a president who does nothing but tell us the truth whenever he speaks, just that will be enough.

Hillary is the ultimate establishment candidate in a year of insurgency.

Hillary Clinton will not be elected president of the United States.

Why? Because she can’t win, that’s why.

And the sooner you figure this out, the calmer you will be.

She wants desperately to win. She’s endured painful decades of Bill, years of Barack, eating all the insults like so many sins and swallowing them down as the price of her ambition. It’s all there in the dull weight of her eyes.

But I just don’t see Hillary winning this election, because she’s the lone candidate of the establishment in a year of insurgency.

Common wisdom and her fierce Clinton tribalists will probably want me burned at the stake for heresy, or chemically altered, or maybe just being hanged from the Tribune Tower will do.

But this is an insurgent year. And she’s the Empress dowager of the Washington establishment.

Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders isn’t an establishment creature. And on the Republican side, economic nationalist and self-funding Donald Trump and conservative Ted Cruz are definitely not establishment. Cruz and Trump have been at war with their party. The GOP establishment needs Cruz now but they don’t like him.

And they’re angry with Trump because he won’t take their money, although in the last Republican debate Trump did something brilliant. He suggested he may be open to fundraisers if he’s the Republican nominee, smartly giving those money boys an opening. This was missed by the media in all the talk of Trump’s new tone. But the insiders certainly noticed. All they want is access. By hinting that he may allow it after the Republican convention, Trump means to charm them into leashing their dogs.

That leaves Hillary Clinton, with her massive fundraising, her Democratic Party insider status, the Wall Street speeches bringing more cash, the Clinton Foundation clout, the connections foreign and domestic.

Clinton is the political embodiment of the establishment. And that spells serious trouble for her, because the American people are in an insurgent mood, fueled by the holes in their bank accounts, all those jobs Bill Clinton sent overseas with his support of NAFTA, and the rifts in what we once called the common culture. It spreads across class lines like fire in a dry riverbed. It won’t stop until the weeds are gone.

Most of the public focus has been on the Republican side, on the anger over there. But the Trump rally in Chicago was shut down Friday after anti-Trump protesters massed inside the gathering.

Trump draws the spotlight, and an industry has sprung up of media meat puppets of the liberal left and of the war party center right. They wring their hands and warn America that if Trump or the conservative Ted Cruz is elected president, the republic will collapse.

It won’t. But the rhetoric is quite hysterical, the theatrics entertaining, and you probably should understand the technique.

The screaming at enemies has two purposes: The first identifies the foe. That’s understood. But the second involves herding votes.

Because the longer you can compel the tribe to shriek wildly and point at that tiger in the night forest, the more you can get them to fear what’s out there, the tighter the villagers are bound to your side around the campfire.

It’s not only about pointing at the enemy. It’s about using shame — even on social media — to make sure the simple villagers won’t stray.

But the Democrats have far fewer villagers this year. Their turnout in primaries is low. The energy is all on the Republican side. And all that shaming has kept Americans blind to Clinton’s weakness.

She has other problems, including the consensus from primary exit polls that she’s considered to be a liar. Young women don’t like her much, perhaps because Clinton’s old feminist allies tried to shame them into submission. Now Hillary is thought of as some angry grandmother.

She seems overly scripted, stuffy, tired, as if every word she speaks has been poll-tested and run past criminal lawyers. And she still hasn’t won that critical FBI primary over her email scandal.

Clinton kept top secret information on a private email server and the secrets may have been hacked by foreign intelligence, compromising lives and American policy. Her IT guy has been given a grant of federal immunity and is cooperating.

FBI Director James Comey is a close friend of corruption-busting former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago. They’re cut from the same stone. Don’t be surprised if he drops one on her.

Asked in the recent Democratic debate if she would drop out if indicted, Mrs. Clinton was offended.

“Oh for goodness — that is not going to happen,” she said, angry. “I am not even answering that question.”

Even Democrats who aren’t excited by Clinton say that she deserves the nomination. And, if she could be honest for a moment and drop the gender identity war club, she might say that gender aside, she deserves it, too, for all the time she’s put in climbing.

But Clint Eastwood explained all you need to know about the deserving to a dying Gene Hackman in the Oscar-winning western “Unforgiven.” Hackman, shot and on the ground, said he didn’t deserve to go that way.

“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it,” Eastwood told him.

And it was done.

Deserves have nothing to do with power politics. Timing is everything. And I don’t see Hillary winning, because she’s the wrong candidate at the wrong time.

Jayne and Jon Cornwill, an Australian couple, recently came to America with a bit of trouble. The trouble was boys.

They have three little boys, and three rambunctious boys were quite enough for the Cornwills, thank you. What the Cornwills wanted was a little girl.

But all they got were boys. And this led to what is known in the sex selection business as profound “gender disappointment.”

“It’s like mourning the death of a child you never had,” Mrs. Cornwill told British TV.

Let that one sink in for a moment, will you?

“My husband wanted a little girl that one day he could walk down the aisle,” she continued. “I wanted a daughter so I could have that relationship … and our sons wanted a little sister.”

So they turned to modern science, which many believe can solve the problems of the modern age. And they found an answer to gender disappointment:

Pre-implantation genetic screening, or genetic gender selection.

Currently, among people who think they already have too many boys or girls, or those who belong to cultures that prize one sex over the other, the troublesome gender can be discovered through amniocentesis, or now even through a blood test, and then the “trouble” is aborted.

In some cultures, China for example, the birth rate of boys is higher. Families often abort girls because of the government-mandated one-child-per-family rule. But genetic sex selection can do away with all that. The Cornwills could implant a female embryo into Jane and have that girl.

And that’s just what they did.

However, in Australia, pre-implantation genetic screening remains illegal. The Australians are worried about what happens to human beings when we use genetics to select the traits of our children.

Happily for Jane and Jon, the procedure isn’t illegal in the U.S. Reportedly they found an American clinic and paid $50,000 and had that girl of their dreams.

Actually, I’m not all that interested in the pathologies of random Australians depressed at having boys. Boys are trouble indeed, they’re messy, they get mud everywhere, they kick soccer balls in the house and let the dog run on the carpet with wet paws. But my wife and I happen to like boys very much.

The thing is, whatever we’d been blessed with, we’d be thankful.

What I am interested in is what this means to the future of humankind. So I called someone who would know.

Dr. Leon Kass, the renowned bio-ethicist. Kass is no relation, but years ago, I used to tell Tribune science writers when they’d visit the University of Chicago to say hi to my Uncle Leon.

I’ve admired his mind for many years, and interviewed him recently on WLS-AM.

“One should say right away that no person who is honest with themselves can be an enemy of medical technology,” said Dr. Kass. “Many of us are alive, or our loved ones are alive, and well, thanks to astonishing advances in medical science and technology.

“But these devices and techniques that are used to heal disease and relieve suffering are pushing against the boundaries that make us human,” Dr. Kass said.

Think of it. This business of genetic sex selection moves procreation into manufacturing. It gives parents mastery over the next generation.

“This is the difference between the traditional understanding of procreation in which children are not made, but begotten, that they are the issue of our love and not the product of our will,” Dr. Kass said. “We don’t try to produce a particular child as we might buy a particular brand of soap. We stand in relation to our children as recipients of a gift and these we learn to accept as gratefully as we can.”

Genetic engineering for intelligence is far away. But he noted that ads placed in college newspapers often seek egg and sperm donors, with height and SAT score requirements.

Having children become products of our wills, beings we shape in accordance with our wants and desires, is a “very, very dangerous new orientation between parents and children.”

And this is how the world changes, or ends, with a silly Australian couple and their need to satisfy their whims with a gender-specific child.

Humanity won’t wake one morning some 50 or 100 years from now to find that we’ve been transformed into something completely unrecognizable.

In the famous Kafka story, Gregor Samsa wakes after a night of anxious dreams to find he’d been turned into a gigantic insect. Gregor’s transformation took only a few hours, so the insect knew he’d once been a man. He could remember it. That’s fiction.

But in reality, our transformation will likely be gradual, perhaps imperceptible. It won’t merely be a matter of style or different languages or dialects. We will have forgotten the questions.